Watch The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne: A Documentary on the Heavy Metal Pioneer (RIP)

“This is sup­posed to be my farewell tour,” says Ozzy Osbourne in a clip includ­ed in the Biog­ra­phy tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­tary above. He then gives the fin­ger and adds, “We’ll see.” The year was 1993, and indeed, there turned out to have been much more to come for the for­mer front­man of Black Sab­bath, the band that opened the flood­gates — or per­haps hell­gates — of heavy met­al. After an impov­er­ished child­hood spent play­ing in the bomb sites of post­war Birm­ing­ham, Osbourne hopped from job to job, includ­ing one failed stint at a slaugh­ter­house and anoth­er as a crim­i­nal. He then turned singer, receiv­ing a PA sys­tem from his father and form­ing a blues group with a few local musi­cians. Peo­ple pay good mon­ey to see scary movies, they one day reck­oned, so why not make scary music?

The time was the late nine­teen-six­ties, when lis­ten­ers approached record albums as qua­si-cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ences. Tak­ing their name from Mario Bava’s anthol­o­gy hor­ror film, which had come out a few years before, Black Sab­bath deliv­ered on expec­ta­tions many weren’t even aware they had. Today, any­one can put on an ear­ly Black Sab­bath album and iden­ti­fy the music as heavy met­al, not a world apart from any of its new­er vari­ants.

But more than half a cen­tu­ry ago, the world had nev­er heard any­thing quite like it: there was the much-inten­si­fied low end of the sound, with its tuned-down, dis­tort­ed gui­tars liable to break into ener­getic riffs, as well as the flam­boy­ant­ly dark themes. On top of it all, Osbourne some­how man­aged to imbue the words, even when deliv­ered in a wal­low­ing or mum­bled man­ner, with a para­dox­i­cal clar­i­ty and exu­ber­ance.

Osbourne’s exist­ing ten­den­cies toward dis­or­der were sent into self-destruc­tive over­drive by suc­cess. Any­one would have put mon­ey on the odds of his ear­ly death, yet he man­aged to come back from dis­as­ters both per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al — many of them inflict­ed by his own sub­stance-fueled Jekyll-and-Hyde per­son­al­i­ty — again and again. Hence the title of the Biog­ra­phy episode, The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne. For fans who missed out on Black Sab­bath’s reign, there was Ozzfest, Osbourne’s rock fes­ti­val that occurred around the world between the mid-nineties and the late twen­ty-tens. The real­i­ty show The Osbournes made him a pop-cul­tur­al icon beloved even by view­ers with no inter­est in his music. Ulti­mate­ly, his real farewell did­n’t come to pass until Black Sab­bath’s final live set, which came as the cul­mi­na­tion of a day-long fes­ti­val put on in his home­town less than three weeks before his death. And though Ozzy Osbourne may now be gone, the Prince of Dark­ness per­sona he cre­at­ed will remain heavy met­al’s ani­mat­ing spir­it.

The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Ozzy Osbourne’s Gui­tarist Zakk Wylde Plays Black Sab­bath on a Hel­lo Kit­ty Gui­tar

Who Invent­ed Heavy Met­al Music?: A Search for Ori­gins

Watch Heavy Met­al Park­ing Lot, the Cult Clas­sic Film That Ranks as One of the “Great Rock Doc­u­men­taries” of All Time

Kids Orches­tra Plays Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” and Zeppelin’s “Kash­mir”

1980s Met­al­head Kids Are Alright: Sci­en­tif­ic Study Shows That They Became Well-Adjust­ed Adults

The Sovi­et Union Cre­ates a List of 38 Dan­ger­ous Rock Bands: Kiss, Pink Floyd, Talk­ing Heads, Vil­lage Peo­ple & More (1985)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.